Activity / Busy / Industrious:
    Veratrum alb has a compulsion to action, just for the action, like cleaning, arranging books, wringing or clapping his hands, singing, counting money, constant fruitless activity.Veratrum is critical and sensorious, disposed to find faults or is silent. In insanity they have the delusions that they are persons of rank, great persons in communication with God. There are many religious affections in veratrum. It may have been the remedy of St. John the Baptist ( provided he was sick, of course).

Anxiety
    In veratrum, it is anxiety that drives him to all kinds of fruitless activities, repetitive action, gestures, singing etc.

Delusion
    Veratrum has a delusion that he has cancer, delusion of blindness, of deafness, of pregnancy. Delusion that he is communicating with God. It is the symptom of haughtiness of veratrum. Veratrum must make a fortune, he wants to become stronger than he is. He wants power. There is delusion of impending misfortune.

Despair
    Of most importance for a veratrum patient is his social position. He is not going to marry just anybody or not going to make friends with anybody. It must be rich people, people with good social level. That is why veratrum pt. are workaholic, he will work very hard to have money and to reach that social position.

Dictatorial / Authoritative
    He misuses power. He covets power. He wants to have power over somebody else. But how does he get there! To recognize a veratrum pt. you have to ask about his past history. He comes from low to high. He frigns he is sick, deaf, blind, and small. He looks for clubs, where he can make a relations.

Eccentricity
    If he cannot get it with power and position, then he does it through an odd behaviour, an eccentric behaviour.

Fear
    He needs support from somebody with authority or with money, somebody of importance. Some-what like arsenic, but more self-assured, fault finding, haughty. He thinks he is the only one who can see the truth. Here the fear is of being alone. Cannot bear to be left alone, yet persistently refuses to talk. And the fear of cancer or some incurable disease.

Mania
    Mania with desire to cut and tear things, especially clothes with lewdness and lascivious talk, religious or amorous. The choice will sometimes have to be made between this remedy and stramonium. They are both loquacious, and both strongly religious. Also both at times are violent, but the face of stramonium is generally very red and bloated, while that of veratrum is likely to be pale, sunken or hippocratic, again there is greater general weakness with veratrum. Sometimes the violent form of mania alternates with a “disposition to silence”, but if irritated gets mad, scolds, calls names and talks of faults of others.